After 8 months of self-taught, I was approached by Netflix and interviewed for a senior position. I need your advice.

Hi everyone, I thought it would be interesting to share this unique experience with you guys and I really need some further advice.

First of all, I'm a self-taught Front-End developer based in Brisbane Australia, I majored in Advertising art at Uni and used to be a digital media editor for 4 years. Last year, I decided to make a career change when the quarantine hit.

So I began to learn Front-end development, after 8 months, I finished my first project, a Netflix clone without following any tutorial and I put it on Reddit for some feedback.

The post went viral beyond my expectations, it got more than 3k upvotes in less than 12 hours. The positive feedback I received was also overwhelming. Thanks again for the supports, all of you!

One day, I got a private message from a very kind and nice senior software engineer who is working at Netflix, he told me he was very impressed by my work and my passion. Also to my surprise, he afforded me the opportunity to have a chat directly with his manager who is based in NYC.

As a non-English speaker, I really can't describe the feeling accurately when I knew that as a self-taught, no-experience, my work was recognized by the real Netflix team. It felt like I'm having the sweetest dream in the world.

A few days later, I had a video interview with the manager. Oddly to me, the position title was 'senior software engineer' which I found out later that all software engineers at Netflix are seniors.

The interview itself went well in my eyes. We talked about my experience, learning journey, passion for SE, and future learning plans, etc. At the end of the interview, the manager indicated the potential future steps would be technical interviews with engineers on coding challenges, homework, and algorithm/data structure whenever I feel ready.

That was when I realized I couldn't get this job at this moment because I know literally nothing about algorithm/data structure. And I have already heard that FAANG companies have really high requirements regards of how good their candidates are at algorithm/data structure.

I wish I could be a genius to know all of the knowledge in just 8 months of self-teaching and got this job. But in reality, I'm not.

I have to accept the hard truth that when the great opportunity came, I wasn't ready for it.

However, I think this experience is still priceless to me because now I know that myself has potential, and I want to become better and better so eventually, I can work at Netflix.

The question is how. What should I focus on next? My thought is that I'll keep job hunting in Australia and gain some solid real-world experience while starting to learn algorithm/data structure.

But how should I know when I'm ready? I mean this question may sound silly but I think everyone has imposter syndrome, I probably need more insights to keep me feeling confident.

I really need your advice. Thank you heaps in advance!